People & Places

Best Act of Larceny Houston 2008 - The Guy Who Stole the Ambulance­ and Smashed Into the Pink Monkey Raid

It was like a scene out of Grand Theft Auto IV: While vice cops were sorting out the detritus of a predawn raid on downtown's Pink Monkey nightclub, still more hell broke loose. A stolen ambulance with an (allegedly) intoxicated driver behind the wheel came careening down Franklin Street and smashed through the police roadblock. Before it came to rest, its windshield shattered and its hood ripped off, the ambulance had sideswiped or smashed into a trailer, another ambulance, a private car and a police car. The driver, who went unnamed in all the coverage of the chaos, was cut out of the wreckage with the jaws of life and headed to the hospital, before eventually joining the 140 other people headed to jail on that most dramatic of Saturday nights. Authorities later learned that the miscreant had absconded with the meatwagon from a Galleria-area 24-hour Starbucks.